The Pirate Bay: Ditching torrents decreased bandwidth by 30 percent

What happens when you replace hundreds of thousands of torrent links with magnet links? Bandwidth consumption falls dramatically. Just ask The Pirate Bay. The infamous Swedish piracy hub abandoned torrents late last month, and site operators have already noticed a big difference.

Speaking to TorrentFreak, a Pirate Bay spokesperson confirmed that the transition from torrents to magnets has resulted in nearly a third less bandwidth being consumed. That figure nearly doubles when the site’s bandwidth-gobbling RSS feed is cut out.

The Pirate Bay claimed in a recent blog post addressing the change that magnets would be mutually beneficial. “It’s simpler for us and no more hassle for you,” said the site. Some users disagreed.

“Magnet links are a lot slower,” opined one TPB member. Another was more profane in his criticism: “Seems like [a] f*cking horsesh*t pile of hassle to me.”

The site, however, maintained that magnets are effectively censorship-proof, as blocking one would also block elements of the page itself.

“Countries, particularily [SIC] in EU, seems to moving towards total censorship so we do all we can to avoid our users ending up with less freedom,” it explained.

On February 20, the London High Court’s Justice Arnold ruled that The Pirate Bay goes “go far beyond merely enabling or assisting” its users to pirate content and could be held liable for the infractions, delivering another blow to the organization. Weeks earlier, a judge in Sweden slammed the door on future appeals from Pirate Bay founders Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström. A Swedish court found the four guilty in 2009, and in 2010 upheld the conviction while lessening three of the defendants’ sentences.

Following the court rulings and closure of fellow torrent site MegaUpload in January, The Pirate Bay swapped domains from the generic .org top-level domain to its home country’s .se country code.

I've noticed that sometimes downloading the torrent descriptor file by magnet link takes an excessive amount of time, before the actual torrent program actually starts downloading the content.

A standard torrent descriptor file takes 2-3 second to download, and then the content is on it's way.

I can understand the appeal because out cuts costs, but at the expense of service. No-one can complain, pirate bay is a free/advert supported service anyway, once you get past the virus ridden pop up redirect windows.